[jnorthrop]

"He told him that we could not share any non-public 3rd party contact information without the explicit consent of that 3rd party."

The European Data Directive, which Google is subject to, does prohibit this practice. Enforcement on this in the EU is sketchy but Google is already under the microscope in the EU for many other practices.

And their revision of only pulling from public sources isn't quite that clear. If they are aggregating that data then it could be considered transforming pseudo-anonymous data to something that is personally identifiable -- or at least the risk of that.

I don't agree with these laws and regulations and I can sympathize with the company but Google is really just protecting themselves.

[codeinvain]

yes but at what cost? , wouldn't it be better that google will have some sort of approval process like in the apple store. at least there you know where you stand.